Can you overcome and move on from a cheat or affair?
Fabafterfifty: Divorce
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Article by Cat Williams Can relationships survive an affair? Relationships expert Cat Williams explores…. The real reason why affairs happen. Before we choose to have an affair, whatever the circumstances, we are experiencing a period of low self-esteem. We usually know that an affair is probably not a good idea but we don’t know how to fix or improve our current relationship, so if an opportunity to have an affair is presented, we may take it to feel better about ourselves. Being wanted by someone else, especially secretly, gives a great boost to our self-esteem. What happens next? Once the affair is disclosed or discovered, it usually has an impact on the self-esteem of both partners. The person who had the affair usually feels even worse about himself or herself than ever, and the partner who was cheated on usually feels betrayed and not good enough to be faithful to....
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The worst thing you can do after your divorce is NOTHING…
Article by Adele Theron. Exercise: Take some time to think back on your life. How have you dealt with loss in the past? (Whether it was the loss of someone special or a beloved pet) ————————————————————————– ————————————————————————– ———————————————————————— What steps did you take that were healthy and healing? ————————————————————————– ————————————————————————– ————————————————————————– What steps did you take, or not take, that hampered your recovery? ————————————————————————– ————————————————————————– ————————————————————————– Healing doesn’t simply happen over time. Healing is an active process, and processing all the feelings and emotions associated with your divorce is essential to getting over it. Divorce acts like a cut and if you don’t dress the wound and work on healing it you will end up with a lot of scar tissue, which will leave a lasting imprint on your life. The real killer to healing is the complacency and resignation I have seen countless women sink into after their divorce....
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How easy is it to move on from a marriage or relationship marred by domestic abuse?
Guest article It was with a sick feeling in my stomach that I read Denis Waterman’s admission and justification as to why he hit his ex wife Rula Lenska. He differentiated between the fact that Rula was ‘hit’ and not ‘beaten’. His excuse? She was intelligent, she could argue well, he couldn’t win an argument with words so he lashed out. She was too clever. I myself had to extricate myself in my early 30s from marriage to a man who became violent. To the outside world he was successful and charming. At home it became a different matter. He had to have total control over all his ‘possessions’. It seems that on marrying him I became one of them. The change in his behaviour towards me was dramatic and occurred only days after the wedding, and it something I was totally unprepared for. After the first incident I was...
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The impact of NOT healing from your divorce…
Article by Adele Theron When you repress your emotions, your behaviour and reactions to events in the present are really reactions to past events, too. This has a negative effect on your relationships. You can’t be fully present with those you love until you have released your emotions from the past. Not dealing with your emotions over an extended period of time can also lead to premature ageing and major illness in your body. Said another way, you cannot hide how you truly feel from yourself or others. Pharmacologist Dr Candace Pert, (whom has a PhD in cellular biology and biophysics) and Dr Deepak Chopra, author, renowned endocrinologist, and leader in the field of quantum physics and mind-body healing have spent years researching the lasting impact of repressed emotions in the body. Some of this research appears to suggest that specific emotions can also lead to specific issues in the...
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What does your emotional journey through your divorce look like?
Article by Adele Theron Lucy’s emotional journey: This graph below tracks the healing experience of one of Lucy, a 54 year old woman experiencing divorce which came as a major shock when her husband suddenly left her. It illustrates the first year of the past five years of her life as drawn by her. Lucy’s rollercoaster started off with a big shock stage, an initial paralysis at hearing the bad news of her husband leaving her. She described it as a big kick in her stomach and an indescribable ache. This was followed by a denial stage where she spent days trying to avoid the inevitable, telling herself it was not happening. This was followed by an anger and betrayal stage where Lucy was very angry with her husband. Unsure of how to process the emotions she simply ignored them, and began panicking that she had lost him. She spent...
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Why your friends and family are sometimes the worst support during your divorce
Article by Adele Theron Although your friends and family are an important part of your life, you may find that they’re ill equipped to support you through your loss. I found that even though my friends and family were well meaning, they didn’t know what to say to me and I often didn’t feel better around them. Before you chuck up this well-meaning lot, remember that although they’re trying hard, they’re just not equipped or trained to help you. Society has conditioned them to deal with loss in a particular way. It’s not their fault. They love you very much and they hate to see you suffering. They’ll try to take the pain away and will do whatever they can in the moment to achieve this. Whenever I hung out my friends they would try to distract me from the pain I was feeling or unknowingly invalidate my emotions and...
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Avoid Short Term Emotion Avoidance Tactics during your divorce healing journey
Article by Adele Theron John James and Russell Friedman tell the story of how a mother may deal with a child’s crying by offering the child a cookie. The mother may say “Don’t cry. Here, have a cookie and you will feel better.” Later in life, that child could associate fixing their feelings with food. Eating the cookie in the moment, the child gets distracted and may forget about the incident that caused the upset, but the fact remains that there was no emotional completion of the pain caused by the event. The event and all the feelings associated with it, were buried. Short Term Emotion Avoidance Tactics will help you feel better in each moment BUT the thing to be aware of is that you are not feeling better for real – it’s a false sense of security – a false feeling of recovery. It fits into the False...
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So what are some of the common feelings when experiencing a shock divorce?
Article by Adele Theron My name is Adèle and I am a Divorce Angel. I remember the first four days after my husband left. They were brutal. At 02:30 am I was on my third glass of wine and hadn’t eaten in three days. I had been in my pyjamas for 36 hours straight and had chain-smoked 40 cigarettes (and I’m not even a smoker!). There was a pile of laundry on the couch waiting to be ironed and used tissues everywhere. The house was in absolute chaos and I didn’t feel like doing anything. I wasn’t answering my phone or talking to my family or anyone else. I had a vision of being found dead of a broken heart at the age of 85, still wearing my pyjamas, with no love or man in my life. The only time I left the house, I was so distracted, I almost...
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A Letter to Mum, how a poem helped reunite a family shattered by divorce
Guest article by Jan Jack We asked Jan, who we featured as a ‘Fabwoman’ to explain more about how her poetry has touched lives When I first set up Perfect Verse someone asked me “How on earth are you going to make money? It will NEVER work.” A good question – albeit combined with a somewhat negative view. But even I am amazed at how versatile poetry can be; since that time I’ve written Best Man Speeches, Father of the Bride Verse, and even promotional verse for businesses. But the Perfect Verses which mean the most to me are the ones which bring people together. For example, I’ve helped a sister breach a gap with her brother after an argument; I’ve helped someone thank their step-mum for stepping in and bringing her up from the age of three, and I’ve helped re-unite a family shattered by divorce. The divorce case...
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When Self-Love Means Rewriting the Rules – Defining my own Divorce
Article By Lisa McCourt I teach the combined arts of authenticity and self-love, and one of the most profoundly transformative skills my students learn is the ability to rewrite rules. When you start loving yourself enough to script your own life, independent of the expectation of others, shift happens. My most difficult and significant rule re-writing took place as my marriage was winding down. Greg is a warm, kind, smart, generous, and all-around wonderful man, but for reasons I won’t go into here, our marriage had stopped working for me. With the help of several years of marriage counseling and many personal-development and relationship courses, we were able to overcome old patterns and significantly strengthen our partnership with the exception of one vital component: I could never reawaken the romantic attraction I had once felt for Greg. I valued him as an important person in my life, but I could not...
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